


like turning air to gold

by sapphicish



Category: Watchmen (TV 2019), Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath, Gen, Post-Canon, eventually i will stop writing laurie being melancholy and instead write her being horny, it's 2020 and i am still thinking about them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:42:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22089583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphicish/pseuds/sapphicish
Summary: “Jon, now would be a good time to give me some sort of sign.”Following the events in Greenwood, Laurie works everything out. Kind of. She's trying her best.
Relationships: Laurie Blake & Angela Abar | Sister Night, Laurie Blake & Wade Tillman | Looking Glass
Comments: 4
Kudos: 36





	like turning air to gold

**Author's Note:**

> happy new year don't forget to thank regina king and jean smart for everything they've done for us

Laurie broke the silence. 

“You feeling alright?”

Antarctica stretched out all around, an expanse of endless fucking white, and she felt like she was going to go snow-blind if she looked at it any longer. There was nothing she hated more than this exact place, and knowing that she'd have to spend even more time in this ship with her only company being Adrian fucking Veidt and Wade fucking Tillman was not making her feel any better about this scenario, but they had enough preserved rations and water for the trip and a bathroom, all which seemed like huge luxuries compared to being in Kavalry headquarters having to tell a band of white supremacists that she _really_ had to piss right-fucking-now or else she'd be doing it all over their chair.

So. It was the little things, really.

Wade met her eyes for a long, passing moment over Archie's controls, all lit up along the consoles in front of them. His brows furrowed. He looked like some sort of bewildered, horribly depressed lemur, which was – you know, classic Mirror Guy. “What?”

Laurie rolled her eyes. People always suspected the worse of her even when she was just asking a simple fucking question, so this was no surprise either. She looked at poor, unconscious Adrian again, just to take in how satisfying it was: they'd tied him to one of the pilot chairs with a length of cord found in the back of the ship, drawn tight around his wrists and ankles, a little too tight because he deserved it. From the floor, just so that they could both have the satisfaction of watching his body flop around in the initial lurch of movement when Archie started up. It was familiar, too familiar, and it made her think too much about the past, which was why she'd started this conversation in the first place.

To stop thinking.

That and Wade looked really, really fucking pale.

“Well, you threw up like...twice? Three times? Before we got in this thing, so I'm just checking in. If you faint at the controls I'm going to kill you before this ship does. The auto-piloting function only works _if you turn it on._ ”

Wade twitched. “...I'm fine,” he said, a little strained at the edges.

She settled back in her chair with a snort. Maybe she was being too hard on him, but what the fuck did she care? Her nerves were shot. “Right. Whatever you say. Look, he'll need another whack to the skull if he wakes up – if we have any hope of getting through the rest of this trip quietly.”

“I can manage that,” Wade said.

“Yeah. I bet you can. Thanks for this, Mirror Guy.”

“It's Looking Glass,” he said dully, all quiet. She was wearing him down – soon enough he would stop correcting her altogether. “What are you thanking me for?”

“Showing up? Coming for me? I know that wasn't the only reason you were there – but...you know. Still.” God, she hated thanking people – it grated in her throat, like she was getting blisters from it. “I owe you one.”

“I didn't do anything,” he said. He sounded as tired as he felt, but he always sounded like that – the most she could hope for was that he was going to make the trip without falling asleep.

“No,” she said, because it was kind of true – neither of them had done shit in that situation, really, thanks to a certain blue fuck who liked to teleport people away without warning, but now they were doing something. “But you hit Adrian over the head with a wrench.” She paused to relive that delightful moment in her mind. “That's more than enough for me.”

Wade huffed softly, a little like he wanted to laugh but just didn't know how to, and she could sympathize with that, could understand it, so she left it alone and left him alone. She closed her eyes, thinking about how Tulsa would look when they got back. Who would be alive. Who would be dead.

At least this chair was more comfortable than the last one that she'd been stuck in for over thirty fucking hours.

It took Laurie four hours to finally get back to her motel after they landed in Tulsa, because there was a whole bunch of shit to deal with in the twenty-four hours following this entire disaster – like the complete and utter destruction of just about everything in a five-block radius, and counting casualties, and talking to Jenny and Red Scare and even Bian, Trieu's kid, who gave the absolute minimum in information and had at least two different panic attacks in the same hour Laurie spent talking to her. What mattered was this: Angela was alive, all three of them had seen her. What also mattered was that Adrian was staying in a cell until she could take him with her back to Washington in three days. She could imagine how that would turn out: Adrian being taken away, and then being taken away herself, only to be stuck in a ''debriefing'' afterwards for too fucking long after being taken to some dark, mysterious ''classified location'' the moment she landed, probably in a dark car with tinted windows and a bunch of jerkoffs wearing the exact same suits and grim, stoic looks on their faces.

Debriefing, interrogation...it was all the same shit. She knew that too well by now.

Wade, she figured, would be dealing with plenty of the same bullshit over here. It had occurred to her to bring him with her back to Washington, whether he liked it or not, but at the end of the day she wanted to make her bosses – such as they were – struggle a little, and frankly, another trip with him wasn't her idea of a grand time. He was a shit conversationalist, and she was a shit conversationalist, and together that made for a lot of uncomfortable silences, so if he was going to end up being interrogated too it'd either be far, far away from her or due to being brought over on a separate plane. He'd surrendered the evidence – that was all she needed from him, and all he'd needed from her, apparently, was the reassurance that she'd keep in contact with him and let him know what the fuck was going on.

Laurie promised it, and it was a while before she realized that she had meant it, actually. If there was anyone who deserved updates on this clusterfuck, it was him.

She stayed with Adrian for two hours, until Wade returned smelling less like despair and his own vomit, and then she assigned him and Jenny – who seemed, in Laurie's frank opinion, far less likely to fuck up immediately than Scare – as his guards (reminding them, very forcefully, at least four times, not to talk to him or even act like he existed) while she went back to the motel and sat on the bed and stared at the wall for thirty minutes. She smelled like too many things she hated: stale air and dust and definitely some kind of faint cologne that she eventually had to contribute to one of the racist, mask-wearing fucks that had handled her back at Keene's warehouse.

It made her feel sick, that last part, so eventually she pushed herself up from the bed and shed her coat, her fingers shaking when she pulled at the buttons of her blouse until she finally gave up and just ripped it over her head. She'd be burning all these clothes anyway – they'd been touched too many times by too many people who she hated too much. One of the buttons flung itself off a wall, the rest rolled into dark corners or under the bed or laid there on the carpet staring up at her. She fumbled with the clasp on her bra enough that it turned into her cursing under her breath at it, telling it to _just fucking open already_ until it did as she moved into the bathroom, leaving a trail of her clothing behind her.

She stepped out of her underwear and stepped into the shower, muscles sinking under the spray of warm water that rained down on her. It felt like it had been so much longer than the – she tried to count briefly and failed – however-many-fucking-hours she'd been there, tied to a chair, watching those idiots go around thinking they were hot shit when now they were all dead thanks to Trieu. That was the only thing Laurie would ever be thanking her for: dealing with the assholes that no one else could deal with.

And then Adrian had dealt with Trieu, another asshole no one else could deal with, and now – well, it was a cycle, right, so there had to be some third asshole who would deal with Adrian in turn. She was hoping that she had a hand in that, that he would live out the rest of his years in a secure prison where he belonged, and that she'd never have to see him again and it was all over and it would stay that way.

Laurie was a realist and a pessimist, in this stage of her life – the two ran together well, because life was shit – but she felt like it might turn out all right for once. Or else they'd all be fucked again.

Laurie rinsed shampoo out of her hair, minutes later, and found herself staring at a spot on the tile of the wall across from her as the suds ran down her back and off into the drain, thinking about Jon even when the water ran freezing cold. She got out and wrapped a towel around herself and sat down on the toilet seat, shaking. She hadn't been there – there to see it, there to see his death and his destruction, to see Trieu's work. She hadn't been there to see Adrian's either, and it was only thanks to Jenny and Red Scare that she knew Angela was still alive at all.

It was the only useful information she'd gotten out of them (she'd gotten more from Trieu's kid, who mostly sat in the precinct staring blankly, glassy-eyed, into the distance, mumbling softly about mothers and daughters and squidfalls until Laurie pulled her attention back around and, yeah, that one was going to need a shit ton of therapy), but it didn't matter. She could choose to think that he was still carrying on somewhere, the way he tended to do, the way he would always do even when the world stopped spinning and everyone else was dead, or she could believe that he was well and truly gone for good.

She hadn't known what to believe, at first, but now – as she stood and made her way out of the bathroom to get clothes on legs that felt like they might buckle underneath her and found herself gazing out of the window toward the area of destruction in the far distance, where it had all happened – she knew exactly what to believe.

The truth.

Laurie didn't make it to the closet. She dropped the towel on the bed and laid there in the middle, soaking wet and staring at the ceiling. 

“Jon,” she said, “now would be a good time to give me some sort of sign.”

The sign was silence, as it turned out: complete, dead silence.

 _Oh, I'm sure Jon's dead already,_ Adrian had said, always so dismissive and quick, always moving on to the next fucking thing. _I hope there's no one down there you care about,_ and naturally it was like – Jon was her first thought, and then she realized it was too late, and then it was Angela, flooding all corners of her mind, the idea of Angela dying when she didn't fucking deserve it, when none of these people deserved it, none of them ever had –

“Nothing?” Laurie said to the darkness of the motel room. “So much for thermodynamic miracles, huh?”

Her eyes ached from not blinking, from watering, and her throat burned and clenched, so instead of giving in to those feelings Laurie sat up and stood up and got dressed.

It wasn't over yet.

Not for her, anyway.

They stood side by side in front of the glistening pool in Angela's backyard, staring into the water. Laurie had let herself in, and after making her way through the quiet of the house had found her there, standing at the edge, barefoot. It was fucking weird. Angela had turned around with a gun loaded and pointed at her – and Laurie's first thought was _where the fuck was she keeping that_ and her second thought was _whoa, déjà fucking vu,_ because it was always her pulling the gun on Angela, never the other way around.

She was kind of into it.

Then Angela lowered it, all the tension flooding out of her body like a tide of relief. She hadn't apologized, didn't do anything but turn back to the pool, but Laurie didn't want apologies.

She just wanted to talk.

“I'm leaving soon,” Laurie said conversationally as she stepped up next to her.

“What?”

“Tulsa. I'm leaving Tulsa. Going back to Washington. I've got an owl to feed.” _And an interrogation to sit through,_ she didn't add. She also didn't say, _and I might end up conveniently dead in my apartment_ or _and maybe Adrian isn't worth all the fucking trouble after all_ or _maybe instead of trying to do something good I should have just stuck to what I fucking know, god damn it._ Because that was all too much, right now, to think about. So it was definitely too much to say out loud in the open, feeling her voice lay all the truths bare.

“A what?”

“An owl. You know, big eyes, feathers, nocturnal—“

“I know what an owl is. Jesus. I just didn't take you for the...exotic pet kind. Or the pet kind.”

“Well, I am.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. So. 'Husband', huh?”

Angela met her eyes awkwardly. “...Long story.”

Laurie snorted. “It always is. Come on. It's too goddamn cold out here.” She turned to head back into the house. “You have booze in here somewhere, right?”

Angela followed after a beat, clearing her throat. “Uh—yeah. Why?”

Laurie gave her a look over a shoulder. “...Why do you think, genius?” She dug through the first liquor cabinet she found, filled two glasses with some whiskey, and handed one over to Angela, who stood there the whole time staring at what she was doing like she wasn't sure _what_ she was doing.

“Now _you_ drink,” she said slowly, drawing out each word and tapping repeatedly at Angela's glass until she jerked it away with a roll of her eyes.

“Don't be an asshole.”

“Sorry, it's in my nature.” Laurie flopped down on the couch and drank deeply, letting her eyes flutter shut. God, the couch was really fucking comfortable, or maybe it was because she hadn't had sleep that was actual sleep and not just falling through a fucking trapdoor or drifting aimlessly in her own thoughts on a ship that didn't go nearly fast enough for her liking in...she didn't know how long. Too long. “So, come on. Sit down. Tell me all about it. You know you're going to anyway.”

Angela raised an eyebrow. “Really? I _know_ that?”

“Yeah.”

They stared at each other for a while – a minute, maybe longer. 

Then Angela sighed, sat down, and started talking.

“Shit,” Laurie said, an hour later.

“Yeah,” Angela said. “Shit.”

Laurie refilled her glass. She'd already done that a couple of times – it was deserved, she thought, _earned_ really, after having to sit here and listen to all of this. Sure, she'd asked, but she knew now that some small part of her had been hoping for the very short and very condensed version. Another part had been hoping for no answer at all. Just silence. Just the knowledge that she would never really know and so she could pretend that it wasn't...

But of course it was. Of course the love was real, the relationship, the marriage. It always was. Real enough, anyway.

She didn't know if that was what was making her feel nauseous or not, but she assumed all the whiskey on an empty stomach helped.

It was so like Jon, this whole story, so she knew it had to be all true – besides, no one had this wild of an imagination.

“I think I can walk on water,” Angela said.

“What,” Laurie said.

“I think Jon may have...transferred his powers to me. I tested it with the pool – I swear it...worked. For a second. And then I fucking...fell in.”

Again, Laurie wasn't sure if it was thanks to what had just been said – and the _image_ of it, of Angela splashing into the pool like a dumbass – or if it was thanks to the whiskey, but she felt something bubble up in her chest, up to her throat, and then she was laughing and laughing and laughing until she couldn't breathe, and Angela was reaching over to smack her on the shoulder, saying shit like _shut up_ and _can you just calm down_ and then, eventually, _uh, are you okay,_ and no, Laurie wasn't. Really.

“Jesus Christ,” she said as she came down from it, wiping her eyes. She still had whiskey in her glass so she drank the rest, thought about emptying the rest of the bottle but decided not to. Her head was light but heavy all at once and her stomach felt fuzzy, flip-flopping, and she'd already experienced three times where she thought she might vomit all over Angela's nice couch. She didn't this time, either, but it was close. She swallowed thickly and stood, wavering on her feet. “All right. I'm gonna go.”

“What?” Angela looked up at her. Laurie suddenly knew that she'd done something wrong, but she had no idea what. “Really? I tell you I might be able to walk on water and you're just gonna leave?”

“I mean. Yeah. What the fuck else am I gonna do? Ask you to prove it? Sorry, but I'm this close to throwing up everywhere already, I don't need that to be the thing that pushes me over the edge.”

Angela snorted. “You sure you should be driving?”

“I'll...get a cab or something.” She paused. “Shit. My car's here.”

“I'll get it back to you. You're staying at Black Freighter, right?”

“That's the one.” Laurie took a breath, looking around the room. She couldn't stop imagining Jon in it—Cal, actually. Jon, Cal. Manhattan. Whoever. She couldn't stop imagining them having breakfast together with their kids, and putting holiday decorations up, and making lunch, and fucking in the bedroom above them, and making dinner, and laughing, and going to sleep together, and waking up together. It was kind of shitty. “Look, I'm staying in Oklahoma for a few more days. I have some shit to do and sort out before I go back home, including looking for Petey who's just...vanished off the face of the fucking Earth, apparently.”

“What happened to him?”

Laurie gave her a blank stare. “That's what I'm gonna try to find out. You know how to get in contact with me if you need to. Like I said, I'll...”

“Be around. Yeah. Thanks.”

She looked around again, one last time. It was kind of a lonely space; kind of too quiet, kind of like her motel room and her apartment back home. The kids were sleeping and Jon was gone and Angela was alone. Laurie could sympathize with that. Too much – it made her head hurt.

She blamed that on the whiskey too, to save herself the trouble, to avoid thinking about how she kind of wanted to stay, for both their sakes.

“Bye,” she said instead, and showed herself out.

She stared out of the back window as the cab drove off with her in it five minutes later, and saw a man she instinctively knew to be William Reeves standing next to Angela in the front yard, leaning on a cane, watching her go.

As she looked, he raised a hand in a sort of wave. She didn't wave back. Instead she looked back ahead as the house grew further and further into the distance, wondering what it would have taken for Angela to trust her with _that_ bit of information.

She would never know the answer.

Somehow, she was fine with that.

She was kind of sick of knowing all the answers, anyway.

They were always kind of shit.

They didn't speak again until Angela met her at the plane when her time in Tulsa was over for good, minutes after Adrian – cuffed and perfectly, blissfully unconscious thanks to a few sedatives – was hauled onto the plane before her. They met eyes over the huge stretch of tarmac between them, and when Laurie started walking so did Angela, and they met in the middle while the plane started up behind them. A stack of files were tucked under her arm, and she saw Angela's eyes go to them briefly, then back up to her face, questioning.

Laurie smiled sardonically, flicking the pile out in a hand so that Angela could see the red _CLASSIFIED_ stamped across the top. “Sorry.”

“That's the way it goes,” Angela said, unsurprised. She was wearing some kind of green-blue silky fabric thing, kind of a turtleneck, kind of not, and her hair was in a bun, messy, and she looked tired. Laurie could see her own exhaustion reflected back at her in those dark eyes because they shared the same feeling, the same...something. Yeah. It was something. They probably shared more than that but Laurie didn't wanna think about that, not now, probably not ever. _Something_ was a good word, a vague word that didn't make her want to projectile vomit everywhere. “Is he in there?” She nodded up toward the plane.

“Yeah.” Laurie rocked back a step, crossing her arms. “Come to see me off?”

“Something like that,” Angela said. “Figured you might be lonely otherwise, since Petey's gone missing.”

Laurie rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah. I really miss him and our weird chats about my, uh, quote-unquote, 'origin story.'”

“He really called it that?”

“Yeah.”

“What an ass.”

“Good lay, though.”

They met eyes. Angela's mouth opened, closed, opened again. “Jesus Christ,” she said, “that's disgusting.”

Laurie laughed until her throat burned. “Your face! God.”

“So you...didn't really—“

“No, I did.”

Angela groaned. “Okay. As, uh, _enlightening_ as this conversation has been, I've got to get back to the kids, so—“

“Are you gonna visit me over the holidays?” Laurie made sure she sounded sarcastic and smiled a little, because they both knew that the answer to that was no. More likely was that they'd maybe stay in contact for another month or so, and then it would begin to taper off, and then by the ends of their lives it would be like none of this shit ever happened in the first place and would seem totally and completely like it hadn't if not for the facts: the frozen squids and Veidt in prison and the Kavalry finished and Jon dead.

The thought still made her want to flinch: _Jon. Dead. Dead. Jon. Dead Jon. Jon dead._ It didn't fit. It didn't feel right, and it definitely made her want to be sick a little, or cry a little, or both. A little.

Angela tilted her head up, chin first, like she was about to pose some kind of challenge. “Yeah,” she said, and there was the challenge. _I'm in if you are,_ that sort of thing. Laurie hadn't expected it, really. Of course she hadn't. Suddenly she felt like smiling for real, so she didn't smile at all. 

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” Angela said.

Laurie looked over a shoulder, then back to Angela, who kept looking down at her pager. Their time was up, then, she realized. “They're giving me the 'get on the plane now or we're leaving you here' signal.” She knew better than to think they actually would, but she was running out of shit to talk about anyway. “I'll see you, Angela.” She tried not to sound skeptical. She trusted Angela to keep her word – but if she didn't, she wasn't going to be surprised and she wasn't going to blame her for it. Still, the thought of not spending the holidays alone for once was – well, it wasn't a shitty thought.

“See you, Laurie.”

Laurie stood still, and Angela stood still, so there they were, standing still, staring at each other like a pair of idiots. “Was he in pain?” she heard herself say sooner than she actually, really realized that she'd said it.

Angela's mouth opened a little, but she didn't speak for what felt like years, to Laurie. “What?”

Laurie cleared her throat. Suddenly she regretted talking, and suddenly she regretted not heeding the warning from the pilots, and suddenly she regretted not letting Angela go. “...Jon,” she said, because it was too late not to, anyway. She'd already fucked up. “When he died.” Her voice was rough – the words felt like knives aimed at herself. “Did it hurt?”

Angela looked at her for a while. “Yeah,” she said. “I think it did.”

Laurie inhaled, then let it out slowly. She didn't know what answer she'd been expecting – she knew that she'd wanted something different, the exact opposite, but she was glad that Angela was telling the truth, that she was being honest with her, after all this time spent lying and dancing around shit they both knew about.

“Okay,” she said. “Bye, Angela.”

They nodded at each other – kind of mutual, kind of awkward, mostly just how it was going to be, and then Laurie turned and started walking.

Angela didn't call her back for anything, not that Laurie was expecting it, and she didn't look back as she made her way up the ramp and onto the plane.

She sat at her seat, up against the window, and stared out as it lifted up – up – and Angela's car was already gone, a black speck in the distance, just like the Millennium Clock, growing smaller and smaller until it was nothing. Then Oklahoma was overtaken by a blanket of clouds, vanishing like the rest.

Laurie looked at the empty seat across from her, where Petey would have been, where he should have been if he hadn't decided to go off and become a fucking vigilante according to recent sightings of some lanky guy in a tight silver suit running around like a douche.

It wasn't her problem anymore, and she didn't want it to be.

She was leaving it in Tulsa.

Laurie drew the blind over the window and kicked off her shoes, then curled her legs up under herself and cushioned her head on an arm, closing her eyes.

“Fucking Oklahoma.”

**Author's Note:**

> yes i WILL have this title no i HAVEN'T read the comics OR watched the movie leave me ALONE


End file.
